"UK house producers Doc Daneeka and Benjamin Damage produced "Creeper" around this time last year for 50 weapons, an eight-minute vehicle for sleek, aerodynamic riffage, an exercise in the supremacy of simplicity. Label heads modeselektor apparently liked the single so much they commissioned a whole album from the Duo and flew them out to Berlin to accomplish the task. The result is They! Live, a lean, confident long-player of stylishly minimal beats rendered in attractive curves and clear, soft tones.

Coming after "Creeper," the way They! Live starts is a little bewildering: "No One" and "Battleships" are lit up by slow-burn organ and sultry vocals from Abigail Wyles, delicate tracks that build naturally with soft, jazzy Kicks and gently quaking basslines. But they typify the album's dignity and elegance: in the wrong hands "No One" could easily be a sickly-sweet burial counterfeit with its pitched-down refrain. The group's clean lines and tight songwriting tell it almost like a pop song. This continues through the whole record: no matter what style or idea is being explored by the duo, it's always executed with efficacy and a sense of cavernous space that gives each track a simultaneously enormous but graceful presence. Even a relatively sprightly song like "Ellipsis Torment" feels starved of nutrition in this vacuum, a bottomless void that gives Daneeka & Damage's house-indebted music a Techno tinge.

As a result, They! Live actually slots in quite well with the narrative strand of drowsy beat music that seems to be dominating the dialogue as of late: "Charlottenburg" has all the hallmarks of a banger, glossy chords, hyperactive rimshots and a kick that skips across the surface like a rock on a lake, but it's all doled out in sluggish shades of grey, not quite hazy (the production is too impeccable for that) but sleepy-eyed all the same. That's not to say it's all half-lidded horizons and lucid dreams: an abridged "Creeper" is the album's triumphant centrepiece, and tracks like "Deaf Siren" and "Juggernaut" hint at blow-outs even if they are always carefully reined in.